Whenever I speak with our customers, I’m consistently impressed with what they’ve achieved with our network automation and orchestration products. Whether they’re just getting started with automating network change tasks, or they’re pushing to deliver a self-service platform to their IT and application teams, each customer leverages Itential’s capabilities to achieve their automation goals. Enabling teams to meet their technical and business objectives, wherever they are in their automation journey, is our top priority. It’s always exciting to see it put into practice.
These are the main value enablers of the Itential Automation Platform that I hear most — including from leadership, network teams, and cloud teams.
Integration Flexibility Across Your Entire Ecosystem
Today’s networks are more diverse than ever before, so teams are struggling to manage a growing array of tools, technologies, and systems. The Itential Automation Platform was built out of one core principle: the value of automation increases exponentially when it becomes simpler to connect to all of this.
To address that, we’ve developed an open source library of Pre-Built Adapters. It contains over 300+ assets for integrating with public cloud providers, SD-WAN solutions, and hardware vendors like Cisco and Juniper, as well as IT systems, monitoring, telemetry, discovery tools, DevOps pipelines, and more. In addition, Itential users can auto-generate their own adapters to systems that use REST APIs with Itential’s Adapter Builder.
Once integrated, the Itential Automation Platform provides common tooling and capabilities, such as Configuration Manager, to enable engineers to develop powerful automations across technologies as diverse as traditional CLI-based IP devices to API-driven SASE platforms.
“We chose Itential because our environment is truly hybrid and their platform works best with both worlds.”
— Guruprasad Ramamoorthy, VP, Global Head of Network Architecture, Engineering & Operations, S&P Global
No Need for SMEs to Learn Complex Automation Tools or Languages
Itential’s visual drag-and-drop interface abstracts automation tasks for everything from a traditional CLI to an API-enabled system. With this approach, building automations becomes its own easy-to-learn skill that can scale inside an organization. This enables network subject matter experts to avoid chasing deep scripting or software development expertise, and instead focus on their area of specialization.
“We were impressed with how quickly we were able to get our team up and running with Itential. Within 24 hours we had started building automations that were already integrated with our ecosystem. The platform’s ease of use made it possible for our team to start automating almost immediately.”
— Lead Network Engineer, Leading Digital Payments Company
Another way Itential helps you mitigate the skills gap is with our Pre-Built Automations, a library of 100+ (and counting!) open source Pre-Built Automations built for all the most common network automation use cases, which can be incorporated into larger workflows as drag-and-drop tasks. Users can also take any automation workflow they’ve built and package it as a Pre-Built that’s published in the same way, so it’s easy for others on the team to leverage.
With these capabilities, many users are recognizing that the real value of a modular approach is the ability to mature from single-use scripts and playbooks to a model where they can focus on creating and using a library of reusable, extensible assets. In this model, network engineers never build things from scratch when they don’t need to, and assets can be built and shared for others in a few clicks.
Reuse & Extend Current Automations & Tools
Many of our customers start looking at solutions like Itential when they already have libraries of assets like Python scripts, Ansible Playbooks and Modules, Terraform Plans, and others. A lot of single-platform, holistic automation solutions ask you to rip-and-replace and start from scratch. But you’ve already invested time and effort into building these assets — if automation is supposed to help you do things faster and easier, throwing that work away doesn’t really add up.
At Itential, we aim to let network teams leverage any and every tool they use today (or want to adopt in the future) so they’re always using the right tool for the right job. Itential’s Automation Gateway is our answer. Users can safely onboard scripts, incorporate them into larger automations, and securely share them across the organization.
Just like the integration flexibility and ease of use that Itential provides, this ability to leverage and extend the automation assets you have today makes Itential more practical to adopt and faster to start delivering measurable value. You can go from relying on power users who build and execute all your scripts, to enabling all your network engineers to participate in automation. And the effectiveness of those power-scripters goes up too — they can specialize and know that their work is going towards producing reusable assets that create real value.
For a full explanation of how Itential onboards scripts and similar automation assets for use in your API-based workflows, take a look at this deep dive on the Itential Automation Gateway.
“Before Itential, nobody but our best engineers could write and use Ansible Playbooks — now, they’re available in Itential so engineers with no coding experience can drag-and-drop them and get upgrades working by lunch.”
— Manager of Network Engineering, Major U.S. Airline
Deliver Self-Serve Networking & Expose Automation Across IT & App Teams
Itential is committed to ensuring automation is easily accessible to your end users. That’s why Itential exposes its API northbound for external systems. Automations can be called by DevOps pipelines, scheduled for specific times, or triggered by events in the network. This increases consumption and makes each automated process more valuable to your organization as a whole.
In addition, we launched our certified ServiceNow app earlier this year, which allows network teams to publish automations right to their organization’s ServiceNow environment for self-service by IT and application team users. With so many companies using ServiceNow as the hub for their IT organizations, the app allows networking to deliver automated network changes as services to their IT end users without asking those end users to do anything new.
“We are now faced with more tools that require automation via APIs, and writing our own scripts via Python and Ansible is not agile enough anymore. The end goal is to have an end-to-end, self-service automation platform that all our engineers can use. Itential is the only solution that can support this.”
— Network Automation Director, Top Fintech Firm
With Itential, self-serve networking is easy to incorporate with your organization’s current ways of working, making it a more practical and achievable target that delivers value right away.
What Next?
Along with these reasons I hear from our customers, we’ve also received top industry recognition, including a place on the Futuriom 50 and the 2022 Gartner Cool Vendors for Network Automation report. Our products make automation easier to achieve and help you see value faster by simplifying complex network management — and it doesn’t stop there. Whether you’re just getting started, or already looking at self-service networking, Itential’s capabilities can help you progress to the next stage of your automation journey.
Want to dive deeper into the cool things our customers have achieved with our software, from those just starting their automation journey to the most advanced? Check out some of our recent customer success stories here.
And if you’re ready to start automating, schedule a demo with our experts or take a workshop for a hands-on look at the platform.
Kristen H. Rachels
Chief Marketing Officer ‐ Itential
Kristen serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Itential, leading their go-to-market strategy and execution to accelerate the adoption and expansion of the company’s products and services.
